You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol

Louis: Yeah you need a sperm

Joe: Where will you get a sperm from?

Louis: Will you get it from a sperm bank?

Me: I’ve already got one

Louis: Where did you get it! Did you sex? Who with?

Sisters: !!

Theo (6): Person with a baby in her tummy, how did it get there?

Louis: You were being naughty!

Joe: Is your baby already in you?

Louis: It’s a joke

Sisters: Is it?

Me: No

Louis: ‘Well you’ll need to know what children want so I’ll tell you – sweets and wrestling stickers and a wrestling magazine

Joe: What’s its daddy called?

Me: Louis, like Louis

Louis: Isn’t Robert its daddy?

Me: Nope.

Robert: (shaking with silent laughter)

Joe: Is it going to see its daddy if you’re not married?

Me: Yes I hope so

All childish faces crease in horror. Hope so?

Me: Yes! Yes of course!

Louis: Is he going to sleep all the time like Tom?

Tom (a baby): snuffle

Me: Not when he’s bigger

Lily (2½, coming to sit beside me, very quietly): I’m glad you’ve got a baby in your tummy

Sisters and Alice (12): (unbridled delight)

Robert had told me how some months ago he had declared love to someone and been heartbroken because she rejected him. And that a glamorous Middle Eastern woman, a single mother who was engaged to a man she didn’t love, had become obsessed with him and now the fiancé wanted to kill him. I dropped him off at the BBC just as ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’ finished on the car radio. That night I was suddenly, irrationally and oddly joyously certain that the baby was Robert’s, though I knew perfectly well it couldn’t be. I sat by an open window with Tallulah and she told me all the ways in which Louis was perfect.

The next day I had a painful conversation with Robert. I found myself being snide, protective, defensive. He was upset, I was upset – chucking out what I half wanted in order to protect myself against wanting it more and it not wanting me. I explained that if he helped me I’d come to rely on his help. ‘Look, shall I come over?’ he said, and I said no, I’d want you to come and stay and be here. And of course I wouldn’t really. He’d just be smoking, drinking, requiring instructions, taking no responsibility. That phrase want/don’t want applied to us both. I cried a lot, after I’d hung up.

Two days later I sat Louis down, gave him a vodka, and told him. He straightened his shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘Well it must be mine then.’ I knew in that movement that everything was going to be OK, and I was right. Everything I wrote in my notebook about him at the time – he’s sunny, he’s private, he’s reliable, he’s mysterious – turned out to be true. I was unbelievably lucky in who I got accidentally pregnant with. We both were.

The following day I had the first scan: there it was, a tiny little thing having a kip. An ammonite, a croissant, a coracle. Eight weeks, they said. Louis had rung to give me all his phone numbers and ask if he could come to the next scan. Sometimes you can feel reassurance running through your veins.

I had to drop a tape off at Robert’s. He answered the door shirtless, and for a strange moment there on the steps in the London sun it was as exactly as if we were in love. I told him about the scan, and the dates.

‘So there’s no chance it’s Lockhartian in origin?’ he said sadly.

‘No.’

‘Have you told Louis?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’ve fucked him now?’

‘No!’

‘Fuckin’ hellfire, why not?’

‘Because I don’t love him,’ I said.

*

My father was in hospital having heart surgery again, which terrified us all. (‘News like yours would give him another heart attack,’ Robert said.) My sister-in-law was about to give birth. My Harley had been stolen, and the insurance cheque arrived the week I found out I was pregnant – well there’s a message from Fate. No more leathers for me, for the duration. Everyone expressed their fears and concerns about my situation in the best and worst ways: I have never had so much advice in my life. I should marry him, I should have an abortion, I should be aware I’ll never make any money now, my career is over, no one will want to marry me, Louis will be sad if he thinks I’m waiting for someone better, we should live together, if I won’t move in with him I should move in with Robert. Shotguns were polished, voices were raised, true natures revealed. Relatives arrived from Ghana. My dad said to Louis, ‘I suppose I should take you into the library for a chat about your intentions, but I don’t have a library. How about the dining room?’ Louis and I sat in the middle of all this getting to know each other, saying to each other: ‘It’s going to be fine.’ To everybody else, we said: ‘One thing at a time, you know.’ The phrase ‘no, we’re just good parents’ emerged. ‘Semi-detached’ was another. We went around together, happy, fond, pregnant, proud, planning to stick by each other, but we weren’t a couple, nor planning to be.

My old friend Cynthia, the perfect embodiment of Jewish humour, was over from New York. She sat us down. ‘Could you have made it weirder if you tried?’ she asked.

‘He could have been gay?’ I suggested.

‘No, that would have been easier. No jealousy,’ she said.

‘OK, one-legged?’

Louis offered to cut his leg off.

Cynthia pointed out, later, that I couldn’t fall in love with Louis if I wasn’t sleeping with him.

It was so confusing for others that we had to make it clear for ourselves, and we did.

I didn’t stop to think of it being confusing for Robert. I wrote down a conversation we had in my notebook: